View Point

The e-vehicle industry is speeding up, and if you have anything to do with cars it’s time to get moving. We are in a very exhilarating time, as electronics and the Internet of Things (IoT) are changing almost every aspect of cars and how the public relates to them.
Automotive design has always been

There has been a tremendous amount of buzz around the recent unveiling of Elon Musk’s Tesla Powerwall, and even if the product does not completely live up to the hype it has already changed the debate on power management in the grid. Once focused on grid-level solutions, the discussion of energy storage in

Unfortunately technology development is guided (and often blocked) by the infrastructure issues of the previous technology(s). Nowhere is this more apparent than in solid state lighting, especially that driven by LEDs.
There is an old story in technology development that asks about the dimensions

Once in a while we see echoes of things past in new technology development, in this case, the Internet of Things (IoT) has shifted an old methodology to its zenith of maturity. In both hardware and softweare, managing the IoT requires us to think of devices as clients again, an echo of things past from the beginnings

The ugly side of our electronics industry is the often dangerous and toxic byproducts and waste from the creation of electronic products and their disposal. E-waste doesn’t have to be a problem; it can be a renewable resource if we manage it properly. Americans generate million of tons of e-waste every year,

The biggest buzzword out there since “The Internet of Things” (IoT) was coined by Kevin Ashton is currently the term “Wearables”, a subset of the cloud-based user-oriented marketplace the IoT represents. Wearable devices have been presented as the very culmination of personal device technology,

The current state of technology debate in America boggles the mind. Instead of discussing the engineering and development challenges involved in moving the USA towards a brighter future of advanced manufacturing, smart cities, and an Internet of Things enabling and empowering everyone with new products and services,

The Skinner Box (properly called the “operant conditioning chamber”) was created by B. F. Skinner while he was a graduate student at Harvard University. Used to study conditioning, it has been used as a metaphor when discussing drugs or other addictive behaviors. The addictive behavior in this case is the

The Internet is one of the most powerful information weapons ever created, and it shows us that awesome power occasionally in the “viral” things, the images, messages, and videos that trigger massive waves of response, not only of eyes but also dollars, demonstrating to even the most cynical that one can

In a previous column we explored the issue of black boxes and commercial aircraft accountability (“Should we put bigger batteries in airplane black boxes?”*) through the lens of the Malaysia Airline Flight 370 tragedy. The terrible initial impact of the irreplaceable loss of life was exacerbated by the physical

Let me start by saying that Google Glass is a very powerful tool even as a beta device, and this essay is intended more to enlighten than complain. However, being an early adopter of disruptive technology is a very interesting (and awkward) experience, especially when traveling in a foreign country. In my case,

One question a lot of people are asking in the wake of the Malaysia Airline Flight 370 tragedy (yet to be resolved as I write this), and the resulting mystery as to its fate, is why don’t flight data recorders (called “black boxes”), have bigger batteries? In many cases a crashed aircraft can be relatively

Making tools that move has been a part of human development since the wheel and lathe, and the drive to make our tools and moving devices more precise, accurate, and easier to operate has been an almost continuous process since the first complex tool was created. Every one of those aspects are vital to the nature

Industrial technology and processes have been under constant development since the invention of the wheel. From the potter’s wheel came the lathe, fire went from cooking to pottery to steam, and precision went from rough measurements based on body parts and other natural comparators to rulers and levels. The

Our society, already in the throes of integrating multiple disruptive technologies simultaneously, must also integrate the myriad byproducts and their impact as well. We take for granted that the future will be a web of inter-communicating smart devices within a cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure